1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed broadly relates to the field of computers computing, and more particularly relates to the menu items in the field of graphical user interfaces.
2. Description of the Related Art
The World-Wide-Web (“Web”) has become immensely popular largely because of the ease of finding information and the user-friendliness of today's browsers. A feature known as hypertext allows a user to access information from one Web page to another by simply pointing (using a pointing device such as a mouse) at the hypertext and clicking. Another feature that makes the Web attractive is having the ability to process the information (or content) in remote Web pages without the requirement of having a specialized application program for each kind of content accessed. Thus, the same content is viewed across different platforms. Browser technology has evolved to enable the running of applications that manipulate this content across platforms.
The Web relies on an application protocol called HTML (Hyper-Text Mark Up Language), which is an interpretative scripting language, for rendering text, graphics, images, audio, real-time video, and other types of content on a Web compliant browser. HTML is independent of client operating systems. Therefore, HTML renders the same content across a wide variety of software and hardware operating platforms. The software platforms include without limitation Windows 3.1, Windows NT, Apple's Copeland and Macintosh, and IBM's AIX and OS/2, and HP Unix. Popular compliant-Web-Browsers include without limitation Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Netscape. Navigator, Lynx, and Mosaic. The browser interprets links to files, images, sound clips, and other types of content through the use of hypertext links.
A Web site is a related collection of Web files that includes a beginning file called a home page. A Web site is located a specific URL (Uniform C Resource Locator). Web site usually start with a home page from which a user can link to other pages. Online URL ibm.com is one example of a home page.
Users of the Web use tools to help find, location or navigate through the Web. These tools are known as Internet search engines or simply search engines. Almost all search engines provide graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for boolean and other advanced search techniques from their private catalog or database of Web sites. The technology used to build the catalog changes from site to site. The use of search engines for keyword searches over an indexed list of documents is a popular solution to the problem of finding a small set of relevant documents in a large, diverse corpus. On the Internet, for example, most search engines provide a keyword search interface to enable their users to quickly scan the vast array of known documents on the Web for the handful of documents which are most relevant to the user's interest.
There are several examples of search engines including tools called Internet search engines or simple search engines Yahoo (yahoo.com), AltaVista (altavista.com), HotBot (hotbot.com), Infoseek (infoseek.com), Lyrcos (lycos.com) WebCrawler (webcrawler.com) and others. The results of a search are displayed to a user in a hierarchically-structured subject directory. Some search engines give special weighting to words or keywords: (i) in the title; (ii) In subject descriptions; (iii) listed in HTML META tags, (iv) in the position first on a page; and (iv) by counting the number of occurrences or recurrences (up to a limit) of a word on a page. Because each of the search engines uses a somewhat different indexing and retrieval scheme, which is likely to be treated as proprietary information. Refer to online URL whatis.com for more information on search engines.
In its simplest form, the input to keyword searches in a search engine is a string of text that represents all the keywords separated by spaces. When the “search” button is selected by the user, the search engine finds all the documents which match all the keywords and returns the total number that match, along with brief summaries of a few such documents. There are variations on this theme that allow for more complex boolean search expressions.
Although these search engines are useful, they are not without their shortcomings. One shortcoming is that for many popular search requests a very large number of search results are returned. For example number of matches found for the search of the keyword “virus” on the AltaVista search engine returned 1,721,110 Web pages. This large number of return pages makes use these search results unwieldily. And because the Web is recently reported to be growing at a rate of more than one million new Web pages per day, this large number of returned Web pages is only expected to increase in time. To proper prune down the number of search results, more keywords and search criteria are added. Returning to the example of the keyword “virus”, the search results from AltaVista search engine of 1,721,110 Web pages are narrowed down to 16 Web pages with the phrase “Microsoft excel macro virus”, which is much more manageable for a user. Accordingly, a need exists to provide users of search engines intermediate search results to assist in properly narrowing keyword searching.
Another problem with these search engines is the point at which information is returned to a user. It is common for search engines to provide feedback to the user only when the “search” button is pressed and the matching document summarizations are displayed. For many cases the keyword search strings provided by the user give a result having either too many matches or too few (e.g., zero) for the user's requirements. The user then has to repeat the search by adding or deleting keywords. Several iterations may be necessary and the process is often inefficient and time consuming. Accordingly, a need exists to overcome these shortcomings.